'Do mention the War'

Walk twenty yards from my apartment in Berlin and you will come across what
are colloquially named stolpersteine: two brass plaques set in to the
pavement next to the former residence of two Jews, Albert and Erna Lewitt,
who in 1943 were deported from their home to the death camps, where – you
guessed it – they were both ermordet.

Graham Lacey says schools should avoid focusing on a popular narrative of the Second World War.

By Graham Lacey

5:27PM BST 05 Aug 2011

There is an immediacy and ubiquity to this country’s recent history from which Berliners especially cannot escape.

No wonder Germany remains committed to expose and seek redemption for this dark period of its recent past.

It is in this context, and with Berlin as my home for nearly a year now, that I follow the debate in the UK about the place of the Third Reich in its school and university history syllabuses.

Only perhaps amongst Britons, most of whose ancestors’ lives were - mercifully – not ended or scarred by the aggressive expressions of twentieth century nihilistic ideology, could the argument that we place too much emphasis on teaching our recent past, and the years 1933 to 1945 in particular, hold much support.

Of course, I recognise that undue emphasis on a study of this period can only be at the cost of omitting that of other chapters of our own country’s rich and varied history, as well as that of the wider world.

Nonetheless, we must be careful not to downplay the significance of a period when the world almost fell off its moral axis and from which there are still very important lessons for us all, as global citizens, to learn.

Like it or not, 1933 to 1945 were pivotal years which - more than any other in our recent history - shaped the contemporary world as well as provided us with crucial lessons which, if we ignored, we would do so at our peril.

The argument that this period should retain its elevated position in UK school history syllabuses has, ironically, been hindered rather than helped by the popularisation of the subject.

Students have been too easily distracted by its more prurient and commercial elements, whether it be the sex lives of its leaders or the pop memorabilia of the SS, for example.

Even the horrors of the Second World War have been sanitised through books and films that have inevitably given higher priority to commercial success over factual accuracy, and populist narrative over objective analysis.

All this has undermined the pedagogical and moral justification for teaching the subject.

It must be the responsibility of especially schools to focus on the less familiar but more intellectually fulfilling topics of the period, to rescue the academic respectability of the subject as well as to ensure their students appreciate the relevance it holds for all who wish to protect the civilised values which the Third Reich displaced.

The Nazis’ rise to power, for example, provides a fine example of how a small minority can exploit democracy to weaken, subvert and ultimately destroy it.

It also illustrates the vulnerability of government to self-interested pressure groups capable of exerting undue political influence at a time of political instability. Hitler was, let us not forget, appointed Chancellor more as a result of a ‘backstairs intrigue’ (as Alan Bullock famously put it) than popular support from the German electorate.

Similarly, a study of the Nazis’ ‘euthanasia’ (ie. murder) campaign may shed light on the continuing debate on the sanctity of human life and the state’s approach to and treatment of minorities.

And finally, the willingness of ordinary people to turn a blind eye to acts of state violence on their doorstep – and not just in the torture chambers of the secret police – informs us about the weakness of the human condition, as well as the moral dilemmas faced by a minority who chose to defy the authority of the state.

I have read much of Germany’s modern history, but the mystery of how a civilisation that has produced the likes of Beethoven, Schiller and Brecht could also succumb to the monstrous regime of Hitler, Himmler and Goering remains as perplexing and paradoxical as ever to me.

Unless you fall for the myth that ‘it could never happen to us’, a study of the Third Reich still provides lessons for us all, and should retain its prominent place in the history syllabuses of the UK’s schools and universities.

We owe it to Albert and Erna Lewitt - along with over fifty million others.